Em’s Journal

In October, I got to go to Maine College of Art as a visiting artist. It was the perfect time to be there, gorgeous fall days, all that school activity swirling about. I gave a public presentation on the Cardiff/Miller House and had a workshop about design process with the graphic design students. It was…

After everyone went home from WILD_ _NESS/WEIRD_NESS, Rod and I spent a good amount of time discussing how we might encapsulate the exploration of wildness, wilderness, and weirdness that happened at the Inquiry, in a serious work of our collaboration. The concluding project: dedicate ourselves to witnessing and noticing the weird for one year. This…

Scrolling through summer photos I realize how momentous and full these past months have been. Only a few weeks away from beginning the residency at ArtEZ for the fall, I wanted to record some of my early progress towards the project I will be working on there, reversible paper houses that fold down to the…

When the DesignInquiry framers conceived of OTHER/WISE last fall (and/or, for that matter, Rod and I committed to our year of appreciating the weird), we had no idea how much the goings on in American government would warp the focus. Mainly we were thinking about alternative approaches to practice, and how coming at something from…

Some thoughts on DesignInquiry’s Productive Counter-Production residency on Vinalhaven, Maine. Productive Counter-Production, an idea put forth by Gabrielle Esperdy, and fostered by Gail Swanlund after Gabrielle gave a memorable lecture on the subject at CalArts, arrived in my life when the idea of productive counter-production struck as more about doing something different than doing something other than what…

This morning I came across this poster of Robert Opel the streaker in the 1979 Academy Awards. I was reading a bit about his life and here is the video of the fateful event. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IIl3zSYL8k I love two things that David Niven says off the cuff in the program: “That was almost bound to happen,”…

I keep thinking about the idea of a sticky wicket, which I understand doesn’t exist anymore because of technological developments in cricket turf. Now we have wicked problems? Portraits in Creativity a video/story project by Gael Towey. Ancestry Quarterly aims to explore the work of artists who have day jobs (?) The Art & Design…

“How do you get to The Cloisters?” For me and the two full-time gardeners charged with the care of Fort Tryon Park’s sixty-seven acres of forest and two historic gardens, this is the question we are asked the most. Our answer changes from season to season: the paths don’t move, but the flowers do, and…

I’ve been working on a list of 100 blogs to read. From Chateau de Gudanes, this post, about treading lightly: “We want to accept its patina and wear, like an old, favourite, worn and frayed, cashmere sweater that you can’t bear to part with.” and “The restoration and the future design is all to do…